(What follows is a virtual duplication of a comment I posted earlier today to a column in today’s Denver Post. )

Vincent Carroll of the Denver Post has written a badly misguided column, bordering not only on excessive and unabashedly biased cheerleading for someone Carroll once in some sense supervised, but also on irresponsibility from a public-health standpoint.

I’ve written about Paul Campos’ off-kilter “analyses” of fat science many times on this blog. That he has been energetically pursuing his scientifically vacuous crusade for over a decade now does not make him a “debunker.” He is an attorney by training, someone whose job is to argue, not seek truth. The former he does admirably well; in the latter he is a dismal failure.

His latest piece in the New York Times has been thoroughly and expertly fisked by medical professionals (who, the columnist might have noted by now, are conspicuously absent from his various irrational screeds about the “hysteria” surrounding the “exaggerated” claims about obesity). Please see this piece by David Katz, M.D.

The points that Carroll raises in a desultory attempt to lend Campos’ arguments credibility are tired canards by now. Just because the BMI is not a perfect tool at the individual level doesn’t mean that people carrying an excess of body fat aren’t at increased risk for certain health woes (and one of Campos’ favorite tricks is to use obvious outliers like hypermuscular NFL linemen to “prove” that the BMI is meaningless, when anyone with a pulse knows that the overwhelming majority of people with a BMI over 30 are not fit, they’re simply heavy).

Collins also observes that “Campos has never dismissed the danger of being seriously obese.” So how is it that thin folks and really obese ones have a higher health risk as a result of how they are built than people who just happen to represent the majority of people who read the anti-scientific rants that Campos — who also happens to be portly but not fat, or at least this was the case when I was trading barbs with him years ago on a now-defunct running forum — unflaggingly excretes?

But this is perhaps the worst: “When he began addressing the topic, he noted, alarmists were predicting declining longevity in the U.S., which hasn’t occurred.” This is a neon-sign-caliber straw man. No credible health professionals have ever asserted any such thing. Life expectancy has been rising steadily for decades. Does that mean that the health risks of HIV, cancer and playing with live hand grenades are overstated as well?

Finally, life expectancy per se is hardly a stand-alone measure of a society’s health. Consider this:

“[N]ew research from Eileen Crimmins, AARP Chair in Gerontology at the University of Southern California, and Hiram Beltr??n-S??nchez, a postdoctoral fellow at the Andrus Gerontology Center at USC, shows that average ‘morbidity,’ or, the period of life spend with serious disease or loss of functional mobility, has actually increased in the last few decades.”

Thus the fact that we can ably keep people with diabetes, CAD, severe hypertension and other chronic diseases alive without relieving much of their debility does not spell a lack of a negative impact of obesity on America’s health profile.

I should add in conclusion that arguments concerning how overweight people are portrayed in the media, personally maligned both consciously and subconsciously, etc. are completely independent of medical facts and should not be conflated with same, tempting as it may be. I abhor the idea of mocking anyone who might already feel intense shame simply because of how they look and always have, as I am very far from perfect in myriad ways myself.

I’m both honored and excited to have the opportunity to formally review Lize Brittin‘s recently published book Training on Empty (Smashwords, $5.99) which details the former elite young runner’s years-long and nearly fatal confrontation with anorexia nervosa. Honored, because Lize could have asked any number of qualified readers to undertake the tasks of critiquing the book along is journey from manuscript to published work and spreading the word of its availability. Excited, because Lize is a very close friend of mine and has invested a wealth of time, emotion, and perseverance into this project, and as both a fellow writer and someone who has dealt with some of the issues discussed in the book, I’ve long been convinced that Training on Empty is a work in desperate need of a wide audience. The chances of this happening just increased fantastically.

Books by athletes who have survived serious eating disorders, as well as books about EDs presented from a clinician’s point of view, are not in short supply; I’ve read a number of them, and among them have been several well-written, informative, and deeply engaging pieces of literature.

All bias aside, however, Training on Empty breaks the mold in important ways, and thus presents itself as a genuinely fresh addition to the genre. As I noted, there are personal accounts and there are didactic tomes by medical professionals and other therapeutic types. Lize, on the other hand, has seamlessly confined a frank and often terrifying personal memoir with a text that explores the psychological, medical, sociological and even spiritual aspects of a range of related illnesses that affect over ten million young people and adults in the United States alone. And critically, she writes as someone who has truly “been there”: She is an unusually accomplished distance runner who at age sixteen set the record at the Pike’s Peak Ascent, one of the preeminent mountain races in the world. She was a two-time finalist at the Kinney (now Foot Locker) National High-School Cross-Country Championships, placing seventh as a senior, and as a college freshman was the runner-up at the TAC (now USATF) Junior National Cross-Country Championships.

In terms of style, Lize is a straight shooter without being melodramatic, a wordsmith who can turn a phrase without overreaching. “Training on Empty” includes mention of youthful pharmacological and sexual interludes, and descriptions of a tumultuous and sometimes tortured upbringing, but these are presented only to the extent that they help explain their contribution to Lize’s progression down a diseased path that very nearly ended in her death. By far the most gripping angle, for want of a better term, of the book is Lize’s in-depth description of what it was like to be her own relentless and brutal tormentor for so many years. The fear, the resolve, the pathological ideas and plans and actions that few people could ever conceive of, the relentless hours spent both training and maliciously wounding herself — the way she presents these, particularly in the later chapters when she describes her post-collegiate life in hell, is literally enough to bring a grown man to tears. Yet that’s not the important thing. What is amazing, what sells Lize’s story – the horrific details of which are far from unique – is that she got well. In reading her account, there are various points at which one expects the book to conclude with the admission that she wrote and submitted the entire thing from within the confines of a psychiatric hospital or medical ward. That she is not only alive but functioning on a better-than-even keel is why people need to read Training On Empty. 

Sorry I have been away a bit. I have been keeping my eye to the ground anyway, knowing the political climate in which we eat. It has been Painful, I started this morning, showed up at my mom and Dads with the best of intentios about running with their Dog (golden retrever) only to find it was already blind drunk at 10 in the morning. Drinking High Gravity beers, and lots of em. We already talkd about this, and I was pist. Mit Romney has offerd to kill all dogs not inducted to the Morman fathe and I dont happen to agree. But let that go for now. Let us pray for sobriety; of all dogs.

So we saw the national Political conventions of both sides & it was clear Clint Eastwood Dominated….THE SENILE DIVISION!! Wtf, why they never veted his output, I dont know, the GOP seems intennt on self destructioning and if Estwood was paid to flail by the Dems I would of not been surprised. 

Still, the Redsox collpase of 2012 is a mystrery to many. They had a Decent roster, and then they are in last place with no David Ortize or Roger Celemts to halp them thanks to disabled list. We can pray.

Ram Amanuel oversaw a teachers strike in the city of Chiacaco, obne of the major urban areas of Ilionios. So he could not control them all. That sucked. They are still a mess as of the last analyses.

I am tired and have coverd the Issues so I quit, laters

I recently downloaded Frank Turner’s (relatively) new album, England Keep My Bones and was delighted to find what is now my favorite hymn!

~ Doc B.

Not again.

She celebrates it with grilled leg of lamb, the company of loved ones, a respectful nod to her friends and family counted amongst the Rational Faithful, and with these scary, scary Peep cupcakes. Yes. Yes, I made these carcinogenic little morsels.

Nicole Bobek, who won the 1995 U.S. Figure Skating Championship and was a member of the 1998 Olympic team, was arrested on Monday on charges that she had conspired to distribute methamphetamine.

The picture on the left is from 1998, when she represented the United States in Nagano. On the right is her arrest mug shot.

Bobek is not the only distaff figure skater, foreign or domestic, to run significantly afoul of the law. In 1997, Oksana Baiul, the Ukranian who won Olympic gold in 1994, drunkenly crashed her luxury car into a tree in Connecticut. (Baiul seems to have put that incident far behind her, however.) And few could forget the bizarre 1994 drama involving Tonya Harding, who along with her ex-husband and a couple of other dignitaries was part of a conspiracy to club fellow American skater Nancy Kerrigan on the knee during the U.S. Championships. Harding won that event, while Kerrigan was forced to withdraw; at the subsequent Olympics, however, Harding finished eighth and Kerrigan took the Silver medal. (Kerrigan herself, some will recall, was caught on microphone at a Walt Disney World publicity parade saying, “This is dumb. I hate it. This is the most corniest [sic] thing I have ever done.” Although Disney was her sponsor, she has nothing but high praise from me for implicitly laying into those assholes.)

There must be a message in here somewhere for parents whose daughters express an interest in figure skating. Sure, let them do it, but by all means make sure they suck at it–an unusual number of champions seem to pay a heavy price.

This popped up on New Scientist’s online news this morning: Christians battle each other over evolution by Amanda Gefter.

So the Discovery Institute insists that to be a Christian means that theory of evolution must be rejected as espoused in their new Faith and Evolution web site. The web site, Geftner speculates, may be a response to Francis Collin’s launch of the BioLogos Foundation. Collins and crew — with funding from the Templeton Foundation — are proponents of theistic evolution which purports that the supreme being of Christianity chose to create life via evolution.

That actually sounds much like the belief of the minister of my childhood church (United Methodist). Rev. M. loved science, was fascinated by modern cosmology, embraced the theory of evolution, and in fact was a substitute science teacher at my high school. I daresay he’d look askance at being told he could not be a Christian for his scientific inclinations.

Strictly speaking, he was a creationist (divine hand behind the Big Bang, etc.). I recall a sermon in which he compared the imagery of an atom to a galaxy (a loose connection to physical laws) as a tribute to the Christian supreme being. To his credit, he never conflated God with science in the public high school classroom. So even if the magisteria of faith and science might have become entangled when he stood at the pulpit, they certainly did not when he spoke in the secular public arena.

So this is what concerns me about Francis Collins. He’s speaking from the pulpit on BioLogos — analogous to Rev. M’s paean to God via atoms to galaxies. However, Collins is rumored to be a potential pick for head of the NIH. Will he be able to keep the magisteria non-overlapping in a secular venue?

To echo Gefter, allowing the magisteria of faith and science to become entangled serves neither well. The DI’ers and BioLogos just conflate them in different ways.

Now that I’ve expended my quota of navel-gazing for the year and probably for 2009 as well, I can go back to posting like an asshole.
I suppose this is interesting mainly for its novelty. I can’t even feign surprise at the vacuity of the nutter droning on about how American Christians have served as a model of tolerance for the rest of the world to aspire to. He said it with a straight face, but he’s still crazy. Hell, they can’t even tolerate each other, much less people of other religions, homos, and the rest of us. Then again, the newsies always seek to find the most extreme of the extreme, and I don’t pretend that Bob Enyart is representative of anything or anyone besides his own quaintly childish points of view.
One thing that did strike me about the article was its classic wording:
Eleven billboards in have gone up in metro Denver and Colorado Springs that question the existence of God.
Bullshit. The billboards do not merely “question” anything, they state categorically what their creators believe know. You wouldn’t ever see a standard, pro-religion (or neutral) article claiming that people merely “question” atheists. This is demonstrative of the current state of thinking in America, somewhat ironic in light of what this piece is about.
Finally, since I’m obligated to piss on everyone and everything, I will note my own shock at what a hillbilly town Colorado Springs seemed to be when I spent four weeks there as a member of the U.S. Army in 1996. A cowboy town. I had envisioned in my naivete all of Colorado being a Boulder-esque, runner-and-cyclist-charged bastion of stoner-happy progressivity, and I was dead fucking wrong on that score. Still, it’s a beautiful-ass place. I got to see both Pike’s Peak and the Royal Gorge Bridge in the same weekend, and there are not many parts of the country that offer that luxury.
I filed this under “Doc B’s Big Bag of What the Hell” just because I never noticed that category, and because I can.

A couple of posts back, I plugged the Spore game a bit, and I see that proprietor of Pharyngula asks if anyone has played the game yet? PZ shrugs his skeptical shoulders and says insouciantly (well, maybe…I just like the adverb):

I’ve played with the creature creator, which is actually rather fun…but it’s really just the most elaborate version of Mr Potatohead ever designed. What I’ve seen of the game itself puts me off a bit, though. It’s not going to teach one single thing about evolution, and actually teaches several things that are anti-evolutionary. It’s a design toy, not any kind of evolution simulator, but people are gushing over it as if it might actually improve the image of evolutionary biology.

Based on my admittedly limited experience with the Spore Creature Creator, I agree to a certain extent with this, but it might just spark some interest in evolutionary biology even if it doesn’t smack of full-blown accuracy. You know, sort of a gateway thing. I mean, the pulp science fiction stories I read as a kid weren’t scientifically accurate, but they did set my imagination to soaring and thinking about scientific principles. This new video game might just do that to young minds receptive to such things.
Like PZ’s Skatje, the elder fruit o’ my womb has been encouraging me to check the game out. Spawn the Elder is a video game fan boy, but he’s also an evo-devo fan boy, having read the popular books written by Sean B. Carroll and Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart (Endless Forms Most Beautiful and The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma, respectively) so he views the game with the appropriate perspective. Thus, he, along with his old mother (that would be me), was thrilled to watch the National Geographic Channel’s program last night, How to Build a Better Being. [Yes, you must suffer through an advertisement if you watch the clip from MSN-TV's "The First Ten Minutes." Long live running dog capitalist Amerika!]
Although the PR bits that I received in the Chimp Refuge banana box implied at a cursory glance that this might be a documentary about Spore itself, I was delighted to see that the major focus by far was on evo-devo.
The NGC program was very well done. The concepts of hox genes as “genetic tool kits” and how these play into development, morphology and evolution were presented at a level that a scientifically curious layperson could readily comprehend, certainly a bright middle-schooler. The scientists interviewed expressed a true joy and infectious excitement about their research. From fruit flies to Tiktaalik (the fossil fish) to the human hand to the radula of an abalone, the interconnectedness of life’s “genetic tool kit” is illustrated in a very accessible way. The laconic but clearly curious and intelligent Will Wright, the creator of Spore, acted as the nominative “host.”
Spawn the Elder and I really geeked out over this TV show. And what precipitated it? A plug for a video game. So even if “Spore” doesn’t reflect absolute accuracy of evolutionary processes, the fact that evo-devo showed up in popular culture, even if it is on the high numbers of cable TV, made me swoon!
I highly recommend the NGC program. Catch it on the rebound.

Time for a new category here at the Refuge, namely “Hokey Haiku“. It’s just a fun way to communicate a simple thought or observation of the day in a mere 17 syllables. Don’t expect Robert Frost or e.e.cummings though.
Summer’s vanishing
Where is my calculator?
The semester starts
Yep. I’m back on campus.

The lead article in Salon’s newsletter caught my eye this morning when I perused the ol’ Google-mail Inbox. Under the auspices of Salon’s “Atoms and Eden: Conversations About Science and Faith,” Steve Paulson interviews James Carse (retired director of NYU’s Religious Studies Program) in Religion is Poetry. The byline: “The beauties of religion need to be saved from both the true believers and the trendy atheists, argues compelling religious scholar James Carse.” The interview comes on the heels of the publication of Carse’s new book, The Religious Case Against Belief.
Cerberus guards the gates of Salon in the form of advertisements, but this provocative interview is worth the read. So are the letters submitted in response to the interview.

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So AfterElton: News, Reviews and Commentary on Gay and Bisexual Men in Entertainment and the Media just released their choices for the Hot 100 Men List. Granted, this may smack of exploitation a la Maxim’s list of “hot women,” but it prompts me to offer a short list of Guys Who Hang Out (Figuratively) at the Refuge Whom I Appreciate:
The Right Reverend Big Dumb Chimp. Sheer animal magnetism.
The incomparable Warren of The Indigestible. More than a delicious mouthful!
Saint Gasoline. Hot. Inflammatory. Don’t pull his finger.
The luscious SDC a.k.a. mistaSteve of Words of Advice for Young People. Don’t let that droll Hoosier humor lull you into thinking this guy is harmless.
Although they are not bloggers (as far as I know), I give honorable mention and the empty promise of a grooming session to the following fellas who often comment here:
hopper
J-Dog
Bill from Dover
Dr. Eye
gingerbaker
Although no one will ever replace the dudes of the erstwhile FrinkTank in my heart, the fellows above regularly put a smile on my wizened old face.

So AfterElton: News, Reviews and Commentary on Gay and Bisexual Men in Entertainment and the Media just released their choices for the Hot 100 Men List. Granted, this may smack of exploitation a la Maxim’s list of “hot women,” but it prompts me to offer a short list of Guys Who Hang Out (Figuratively) at the Refuge Whom I Appreciate:
The Right Reverend Big Dumb Chimp. Sheer animal magnetism.
The incomparable Warren of The Indigestible. More than a delicious mouthful!
Saint Gasoline. Hot. Inflammatory. Don’t pull his finger.
The luscious SDC a.k.a. mistaSteve of Words of Advice for Young People. Don’t let that droll Hoosier humor lull you into thinking this guy is harmless.
Although they are not bloggers (as far as I know), I give honorable mention and the empty promise of a grooming session to the following fellas who often comment here:
hopper
J-Dog
Bill from Dover
Dr. Eye
gingerbaker
Although no one will ever replace the dudes of the erstwhile FrinkTank in my heart, the fellows above regularly put a smile on my wizened old face.

Bill O’Reilly’s meltdown thanks to a hapless teleprompter is making the rounds again; I saw it on The Colbert Report. Thanks to the wonders of technology, someone has constructed a dance remix of Bill blowing a gasket. Pant-hoot to Bill from Dover for passing this along. Word has it that he found it on the Daily Kos. It’s also resides on boing boing.
Warning: Language is NSFW. Well, maybe it depends on where you work.

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Due to a conversation regarding facts and theories on a message board I sometimes visit, I decided to write a short item for my students answering a simple question:
“If a fact is fundamentally true, isn’t it better than a theory?”

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